A Brief History of My Social Media Use Part 4: The Pandemic Years

Social media was my constant — and only — companion during lockdown and helped me get through months of isolation.

I’m doing something new! My social media detox at the beginning of last month prompted me to take it back to the very beginning and reflect on my history with social media — how and when I started using it, when it stopped being fun, and hopefully, how it can be fun once again — in this new SERIES (!!) called “A Brief History of My Social Media Use.” My initial installment in this series was FREE and not paywalled, so it’s open for everyone to view and you can read it here. If you’d like to read the rest of the installments in this series, become a paid subscriber here.

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My first time donning a mask to go outside, April 2020

If social media helped keep me connected to other people during cancer treatment, it really became a lifeline in the pandemic.

When COVID hit in March 2020, I was living alone in a small studio apartment in Brooklyn. The pandemic was a physical manifestation of my internal belief system and confirmed what I already feared — that the world was a scary, unsafe place and interacting with other people would harm me in some way. With my deepest fears confirmed by the COVID outbreak, my brain took social distancing and isolation and ran with it.

At the beginning of the pandemic, it was unclear if, as a cancer survivor, I was part of a high-risk group for COVID. I was no longer immunocompromised, but I saw conflicting information online about whether having had cancer and receiving cancer treatment in and of itself increased my risk. I erred on the side of caution.

In Brooklyn, I lived three blocks from the hospital where I’d been treated for ovarian cancer, but now New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic, and three blocks away, a refrigerated makeshift morgue truck was permanently parked outside that same hospital.

As much as I embraced isolation during this time, I dove into social media — it was my only connection to other people outside of furtive glances exchanged over masked faces during quick grocery store runs and expeditions in search of hand sanitizer, Lysol wipes, and toilet paper.